Q3 Journal 4

Besides reading lots of poetry, I also used any of the scarce free time that I had to continue reading Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which I wish to finish soon.  Right now, I have gotten through Nao’s summer at Jiko’s palace as well as Ruth’s search for translations and more clues to Nao’s existence.  In Nao’s part of the story, it seems as if Nao has become a happier person throughout the summer away from her terrible life at school.  It must feel horrible every day being bullied horrifically and then being treated as if you did not exist.  The peaceful, colorful summer with Jiko contrasts greatly with Nao’s struggles in her stressful, drab city.  The reader meets Jiko in person for the first time, and she immediately strikes readers as a wise and calm person.  It is also interesting to meet the ghost of Nao’s grandfather, a kamikaze bomber, at one point in the book.  At this part, I start to wonder if I can call this book realistic fiction because it is not normal to converse with ghosts and actually gain insight about the ghost’s life unless Nao is just imagining things.  However, when Nao leaves, Jiko gives her all of the war materials later found by Ruth in the lunch box, which I thought was a nice touch to tie together the stories once more.  Still, I wonder about how that lunch box began to drift in the first place and whether Nao is alive as well.

In Ruth’s section, Ruth seeks translators and others who would likely be able to help her solve this mystery of who Nao might be.  She also looks up Jiko’s writings and emails a professor about Nao’s father, though the writings coincidentally disappear afterwards and the professor never responds.  Again, I wonder if this is truly coincidence or if there is something supernatural going on in the story.  Like in Nao’s section, I am beginning to question whether this is all realistic fiction.  So far, I still do not know the results of what the translators will find, and I hope that all of the questions raised in this section will be answered soon.

*Q3 Journal 3*

For my poetry paper, I chose to read “Howl” as one of the poems for analysis since it was Allen Ginsberg’s master work that gave him public attention for the first time.  “Howl” is literally a howl against all of the social injustices caused by the way the world worked in the Cold War era and even today.  Even though the poem is five pages long, it is thankfully split into three sections, each of which uses a drastically different tone from the others.  The first section, the “who” section, was a long, rough part of the poem to get through.  I could not believe that one sentence could extend for three full pages when I first printed out the poem.  Each gigantic clause, most of which started with “who,” consisted of a group of the “best minds of [Ginsberg’s] generation.”  These best minds generally included people like drug addicts, suicidal people, bums, indecent men, musicians, travelers, and poets rather than the conventional doctors and lawyers, which I found to be shocking.  There were also a number of strange words or repetition such as “yacketayakking,” “bop kablabbah,” and “boxcars boxcars boxcars,” which maybe makes these “best minds” seem as despairing and mad as Ginsberg feels that society has driven them.  Once I finally moved through the first section, the tone completely changes to anger in the “what” section as the narrator, presumably Ginsberg, blames Moloch, an idolatrous god to whom people sacrificed children to fire, for making all of these people insane.  To the narrator, Moloch is the government, capitalism, money, war, and anything else that causes social problems.  I found the many exclamatory sentences to be almost excessive, but it was nonetheless necessary because they emphasize the utter anger of the speaker.  This section is probably where I really felt that “Howl” deserved its title because I could almost imagine the narrator screaming out the lines.  Finally, in the third section, the “where” section, it felt as if the narrator, now more clearly known to be Ginsberg, had gone insane.  Every other line, he repeated “I’m with you in Rockland” followed by what was likely a few events that he witnessed in the mental hospital that he had stayed in for eight months.  The poem seems to get more personal yet much more frenzied, which is emphasized by the run-ons near the end. “Howl” blew my mind so much that even though I could not read it in one sitting, I still felt the “whoa” factor that readers of his time probably felt after completing the poem.

Q3 Journal 2

While searching for good poems to use for my paper on Allen Ginsberg, I found a poem called “America.”  This free verse poem uses many different voices in first person that air their grievances about the United States, and it grabbed my attention from the first line:  “America I've given you all and now I’m nothing.”  Those who do not know Ginsberg would probably think that this would be some sort of patriotic poem, but that first line surely proves them wrong.  The narrators in “America” range from a weary person who feels like America has taken everything away from him to an angry narrator who has become tired of America’s demands, someone who has become obsessed with Time Magazine, a worried politician, one who makes outcries of America’s abuses, an uneducated person who blames the Russians and Chinese for everything, and a voice who seems driven to change America’s condition.  I found it very interesting how all of the voices were in just one poem, sometimes not even separated by different stanzas.  Still, it was not tough to find out where the voices changed because of the shift in tone and sometimes grammatical structure.  At first I did not understand a few of the numerous allusions, all of which related to the Cold War era, but I was pretty sure that all of the events would be very clear to any readers of Ginsberg’s time because they usually related to America’s abuses.  I noticed a few similarities among all of the voices such as the use of anaphora and relatively short sentences.  Lastly, the line “It occurs to me that I am America” struck me the hardest in the poem.  It is probably the most important line, and it is an almost jarring change because the narrators have been complaining about America for the entire first half of the poem only to realize that they are talking to themselves.  I feel that this means that in some way each voice has become part of the corruption of America’s society, which I thought was a very powerful message from Ginsberg.  “America” certainly made me want to read more of Ginsberg’s works even though I knew that next up was “Howl,” a poem more than twice this one’s length.

Allen Ginsberg

After taking a look at and annotating some poems from Allen Ginsberg, I have noticed many common parts that appear in his poetry.   I chose Ginsberg almost blindly, only scanning “Homework” before putting him on the list of choices and hoping that no one had already picked him.  The first similarity I saw is that many of his works share the theme that there is much wrong with the world, specifically the United States.  “Homework” and “America” both point to situations such as pollution or abuses that reveal Ginsberg’s pessimism toward the world in his time.  Since he wrote poetry at around the time of the Cold War, I was not surprised that he had problems with the way that America was handling situations such as stockpiling nuclear weapons and ignoring the environmental consequences of the country’s actions.  Ginsberg’s poetry is also strictly free verse and includes many allusions to events well-known to people of the 1950s.  Readers of his time as well as those who know a good bit about twentieth-century history would be able to understand every reference that he makes, which gives each of his poems an even stronger impact.  These common elements of Ginsberg’s poetry really unify his work even though he uses very different lengths and main strategies to convey his negative feelings toward the world.  I started off with “Homework” and “America” to prepare myself for “Howl,” Ginsberg’s monstrously long masterpiece.   I did not have too much trouble analyzing the former two, but “Howl” is more than twice the length of “America,” taking up five pages of paper and including much longer trains of thought.  It is going to take me at least a few more days to fully grasp “Howl” because it is unlike any other poem I have ever seen before.  “Homework” and “America” at least had shorter verses to help me soak in all of the information more clearly, but “Howl” sometimes has lines that could be worth their own paragraphs.  I am very interested to see what I will find from “Howl” as I begin to tackle it this week, and I know that it will be worth the read.

This Is Water Reaction

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement speech provides useful guidelines on how one should use a more open mentality to the frustrating, mundane events in life in order to make the most out of every moment.  Mainly using an example of getting caught in rush hour traffic and then having to wait in a long grocery store line, Wallace talks about how we go on default mode or autopilot by allowing ourselves to think that we are the center of the universe.  It certainly makes me wonder about how in a few years, I will be subject to having an average, pettily frustrating work day.  After thinking a little, I can see that I am already getting a taste of this every time I drive through rush hour or school traffic every weekday.  As I get older, I will eventually have to face the years where day after day I will get up, drive through traffic, work on the same thing over and over again, drive through traffic again, and try to sleep early to prepare for another boring, tiring day.  It is true that, similar to what Wallace stated, it is easy to get lost in the narcissistic way of thinking that everyone and everything is out to get me as I watch a car change lanes just to get ahead of me.  Wallace’s speech challenges me to think about others’ situations, such as in his example where a lady screaming at her child may have been the low-wage clerk who helped your spouse with a horrific problem at the motor vehicle store.  It gives a new light on these slow, annoying situations by stressing that we can use the time that we are forced to slow down to really think and decide on what has meaning and what does not.  I hope to be able to use the advice in his speech to make my quality of life better as I move on through the stages of life.

(Gonna start adding stuff that I make whenever it sorta fits)

Q2 Journal 4

For my last big reading session of this quarter, I read even more of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.  This time, I read thirteen pages in about half an hour.  I am back in Nao’s section of the book in the middle of her explaining her life at home and at school, which certainly is not ideal.  I learned that Nao and her family used to live in the United States but had to move back to Japan after her father lost his job.  There, Nao was bullied at school for being a foreigner and for being poor.  It is especially in the bullying part that she uses Japanese vocabulary to give a better idea of what exactly she is called.  For example, there is ijime, a term that means “bullying”; Iyada!  Gaijin kusai, which means “Gross!  She stinks like a foreigner!” and Bimbo kusai, which means “She stinks like a poor person!”  The insults are combined with some offensive Engrish (misspelling intended), which I can’t help but laugh at because the bullies try to sound so cool but really just jumble a bunch of English derogatory terms together.

This part of Nao’s story is more exposition than any other literary devices, but it gives us as readers more information about Nao’s hard life.  She lives in an apartment where her family can hear everything from the rooms above and below them, and her father has attempted suicide after his return to Japan and loss of even more money.  It is hard for me to really identify with this because I have never been in such a tight financial or familial situation, but I am sure that some others who may come upon this book can relate better.  I also find it hard to see a similarity with, in Nao’s words, how the “Man of the House makes all the Big Financial Decisions” in America compared to how the woman takes care of the money in Japan mostly because my mother and father share that responsibility almost equally.  Nao’s section ends with how karma, according to Jiko, punishes people for bad things that they have done, such as in the way that Nao’s father ends up feeding crows in the park instead of having a solid job after he spent all of his money betting on horses.  Perhaps these crows will have a greater significance later on, but only time will tell for that.  It was interesting to learn more about Nao, and I hope to read much more of this book as my time frees up for Christmas break.

Q2 Journal 3

The third time I read for pleasure this quarter, I continued Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.  This time, I read about thirteen pages in half an hour mostly in Ruth’s section of the book.  It must have taken longer to read because to me, Ruth’s chapters proceed more slowly than Nao’s.  Here, we are introduced to a retired anthropologist named Muriel who helps examine the Hello Kitty lunchbox.  Muriel takes a very critical, scientific approach to the find, unbiased about how the lunchbox ended up in the sea compared to how Ruth almost automatically thinks that it washed up from a tsunami a few years ago.  It makes me think that perhaps the diary may not have arrived in the West Coast in dramatic circumstances.  However, after reading this part, I predicted that Muriel will not take on a major role later on in the story because she was so suddenly introduced and just as suddenly not in any more scenes so far.

The most important part of this section was probably when the watch from the lunchbox starts to tick again.  There are many possibilities for its meaning as a symbol because a supposedly dead watch starting to tick again is no normal occurrence.  It could have something to do with what has been said before about lost time.  Perhaps by starting to work after a long time of being stopped, the watch represents time being found again.  Nao seems to be communicating to Ruth, the reader, what Ruth currently thinks of the entire situation with the diary:  “I am reaching through time to touch you.”  As Ruth listens to the watch ticking near her, this moment makes it clear to me that Ruth and Nao are connected through the boundaries of time.  Ruth’s section ends with her having a dream about Jiko, Nao’s great-grandmother, saying something about things going up and down.  Currently, I am not sure what this means exactly, but I guess that it will have significance later on.  This reading session ended when I began a little bit more of Nao’s story, which starts to give us a better idea of Nao’s family and school life.  Overall, though I was not drawn in as much to this part of the book, I still enjoyed it and am willing to read and write about more of the novel again.